“Dark and elliptical, these stories have the feverish allure of half-remembered dreams.” —Jeremy Tiang, author, State of Emergency

In 14 thrilling stories about desire, faith, and ideology, The Unrepentant captures the revolutionary fervor of Malaya at a formative time for Southeast Asia.

In Malaya (present-day Malaysia and Singapore), when the British imposed the Emergency to crush leftist and independence movements, the insurgents fought back with ingenuity and ferocity. The Unrepentant tells the stories of these insurgents who loved, doubted, grieved, and hungered amid a revolution. A guerilla draws a priest into the cause. A translator debates the language of the revolution. A tin miner falls in love. A brother aspires to be Malaysia’s first cosmonaut. An exile returns home.

From the tropical night of the jungle to shophouse flats, in which the war for Malayan liberation was imagined and fought, these intimate stories span the 1940s to the 2010s and challenge archival perspectives of the period, blurring the borders between fiction and fact, history and memory. Braiding together the diverse perspectives of Chinese and Malay communists, Tamil estate laborers, Soviet movie-makers, and leftist Christian movements, The Unrepentant pulls the reader into a recent past that still echoes into the present.